Indian Airlines - Better chafe, than sorry

After Deccan, it was the turn of Indian to up the ante when it comes to flouting air safety rules. While Deccan paid lip-service to the process of advising the passengers about the seat-belt and emergency procedures, Indian did not bother with the charade during my flight from Chennai to Hyderabad.

I think Indian is competing with low-cost airlines in the wrong context.

The frustration of a blogger

A few bugs in blogger were evident from the early days of my blogging with Blogger. The latest one to annoy me is the staunch refusal of the blog editor to change the font and size of text and overruling my repeated attempts to bring uniformity into this post and that, and bring them in line with the rest of ToBE.

Makes me look like a shoddy/sloppy blogger while the truth is otherwise. The blogger is not sloppy, the Blogger is.

Gored to death

Quick on the heels of Shastri's posting and Gopa's on how we continue to pollute Mother Earth, here is one on how America's waste makes the Third World sick.

Al Gore had a vision and mission for the environment. My guess is a Gore presidency would have, at the minimum, slowed down the rate of degradation of our environment.

Americans have three things* to blame for the mess the world is in: their electoral college process and Ralph Nader.

Bush has a vision too. And it is usually Sylvester thwacking Tweety on Cartoon Network. The real life tweeties aren't so lucky enough to survive.
_________________________________
* The electoral college's de-valuing popular votes is the reason I mentioned three things and listed only two.

An unhyphenation

Ever a stickler for hyphens, I surprised myself by de-hyphenating "brother-in-law" and still coming up with a meaningful phrase.

"About my siblings and their professions, you asked. I have a sister who is into medicine and a brother in law". Get it?

Was reminded of old friend Amit Gupta's quote about the difference between in-laws and out-laws: Out-laws are always wanted!

Deemed University

All around the city of Chennai, one can see many educational institutions, some of them, deemed university. One of them is Sathyabama Deemed University. In the olden days, in such instances, "Deemed" used to be a paranthesised word.

With "Sathyabama Deemed University", it is unclear if the Deemed University is called Sathyabama or if a lady called Sathyabama deemed that the institution shall be a university. Considering the student (re)action in some of these deemed universities, one might want to be reminded that there is only a syllabic difference between 'deemed' and 'doomed'.

How to start living

A colleague stopped dyeing her hair a few weeks before she left the company. In her last day at work, she was being complimented for her new look. She was leaving the company to lead a new a new life.

True, when you stop dy(e)ing, you start living.

Deconstructing Tiruvalluvar

The Corporation of Chennai seems to have found a typographical error with a specific Tirukkural:

தோன்றிப் புகழொடு தோன்றுக
"Attain fame".

The Corporation feels that Tiruvalluvar could have been wrong. With rampant digging of city roads, they are living by what they believe Tiruvalluvar intended (a minor variant of the above):

தோண்டிப் புகழொடு தோண்டுக
"Dig famously".

Next, we will have the குறளோவியம் author re-interpet morality as defined by Thiruvalluvar.